The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the grip of a fast-moving Ebola outbreak that, as of this week, has killed at least 131 people and infected more than 514, with WHO modelling suggesting actual case counts may already exceed 1,000 due to underdetection. The strain in question — Bundibugyo — is rare enough that no approved vaccine exists, unlike the Zaire strain that ravaged West Africa in 2014–16. Cases have now crossed into Uganda. A WHO doctor warned this week that the outbreak is spreading faster than first assessed, with the disease seeding itself across multiple Congolese provinces — including Goma, a city of nearly 850,000 people currently under Rwandan-backed rebel control. Against this backdrop, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the US response. He replied that the WHO had been “a little late to identify this thing.”
The received wisdom
Progressives and global-health advocates will read Rubio’s comment as brazen hypocrisy — and, frankly, they have a point worth examining seriously. The US, under Trump, withdrew from the WHO on his first day back in office, stripping the organisation of its largest donor. That withdrawal has cost the WHO roughly 2,000 jobs — nearly a quarter of its global workforce. Domestically, the administration has presided over approximately 10,000 cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, plus fresh layoffs in May 2026 at the CDC, NIH, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The mainstream view holds that the US has deliberately degraded both the international and domestic public-health infrastructure, and that Rubio’s blame-shifting is therefore not just inconsistent but reckless — a man setting fire to the fire station and then complaining that the fire brigade arrived late.
Jennifer Nuzzo of Brown University’s Pandemic Center made the point bluntly: the CDC learned of the outbreak only when it was publicly confirmed, despite weeks of prior rumours — precisely the kind of early-warning failure that an embedded global-health surveillance network is supposed to prevent. On these points, the mainstream reading is not wrong.
A different read
And yet the right-of-centre case for scepticism of the international public-health establishment is not simply a talking point. It has a serious intellectual history that the current moment should not allow partisans to paper over.
The WHO’s record is genuinely troubled. Its handling of the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak — which ultimately killed more than 11,000 people — was widely criticised as dangerously slow. The organisation’s deference to Chinese authorities in the early weeks of COVID-19 remains one of the most consequential institutional failures of the 21st century. The structural problem is that the WHO is a membership body in which national governments have outsized influence over the pace and framing of emergency declarations. When powerful member states — whether China over COVID or conflict-afflicted countries in central Africa — resist transparency, the WHO’s hands are partly tied.
Rubio’s phrase “a little late” is therefore not baseless, even if his own government’s actions have made lateness more likely, not less. The more sophisticated conservative critique is not “WHO bad, America good” but rather: the WHO is institutionally prone to the pathologies of multilateral organisations — slow consensus-building, political deference to member states, diffuse accountability — and the answer is reform and better-targeted bilateral investment, not the current all-or-nothing approach of wholesale withdrawal followed by finger-pointing.
What makes the current situation genuinely alarming, however, is that the US has abandoned its leverage without gaining any of the benefit. By withdrawing from the WHO, Washington has given up its seat at the table in setting outbreak detection standards, vaccine development protocols, and emergency declaration thresholds. Gigi Gronvall of Johns Hopkins was explicit: the US is now “worse off to handle infectious disease threats than at the start of Covid-19.” The US has committed approximately $13 million in emergency Ebola assistance — a fraction of what it might have channelled through the systems it has dismantled. In return, it has gained a talking point.
There is an older conservative tradition here worth invoking. Reagan-era Republicans understood that American power projected through international institutions — imperfect, frustrating, slow as they were — served American interests better than the alternative. George H.W. Bush’s administration invested heavily in global disease-surveillance networks as an extension of national-security doctrine, not despite it. The idea that biosecurity is national security — that a haemorrhagic fever in eastern Congo, in a conflict zone with millions of displaced people and heavy cross-border movement, is a threat that arrives eventually at Kennedy Airport — is not a progressive talking point. It is a lesson of 2014 and 2020 alike.
The Ituri Province epicentre of this outbreak is, as Rubio noted, genuinely hard to access: an active conflict zone, hospitals destroyed, medical workers at risk, gold mine workers moving constantly across provincial lines. Rwandan-backed rebels control Goma, which sits on the outbreak’s western edge. These are real obstacles. But the US used to maintain people in-country and in-region whose entire job was managing exactly these constraints. Many of them were let go in the USAID and CDC cuts.
The current administration wants to be able to claim credit for $13 million of assistance and 50 treatment clinics while bearing none of the institutional overhead that made rapid, coordinated response possible. That is not a coherent strategy; it is a posture.
What to watch
- Goma containment: Whether Rwandan-backed rebel authorities in Goma cooperate with WHO and Congolese health teams will be a pivotal early indicator. A major urban outbreak would dramatically accelerate spread.
- Vaccine emergency access: WHO is considering experimental vaccines for this Bundibugyo strain. Watch whether the US rejoins any emergency vaccine-development coordination or continues to stand aside.
- Traveller screening: An American missionary was already evacuated to Germany for treatment; six more exposed Americans are in quarantine in Europe. Any confirmed case reaching a major Western hub will test the administration’s insistence that it has this under control.
- Congressional response: The political cost of visible US absence from a major outbreak response — especially if cases reach American soil — may force a reassessment of the CDC and HHS cuts faster than any parliamentary pressure. Budget politics can move quickly when there are photographs.
— J